A user interface is only as good as the focus that it provides. Digital information environments, such as the World Wide Web, are designed to capture and lead the focus of the person using them. This is often based on the agenda of the person creating the web page and most frequently that agenda is to garner advertising dollars. Thus, the problem of searching for the answer to something on the web only to be forced to focus on irrelevant web sites is a common experience. In such a scenario, a user often fails to find what they were looking for, often forgetting what they were looking for in the first place. This effect occurs because the digital domain is not constrained by the same relevance falloff law that constrains the analog world. Each navigation step may be arbitrarily large, and the human mind is poorly equipped to maintain focus, and thus the search for meaning or relevance in this environment is very difficult. Nowhere is this problem more inherent than in the use of hyperlinks.
In any large collection of disparate data, effective navigation becomes critical. For example, on the Internet the approach taken to navigation was to implement embedded “hyperlinks” which transition the user's focus to the URL referenced in the hyperlink. This works effectively, but is a manual, restrictive, and error prone business. The web-site designer must manually insert the chosen hyperlink to the URL, thereby enforcing his perspective on the user, rather than the perspective of the user. Worse yet, URLs change continuously and the referencing link then becomes out of date and useless. What is needed, then, is the ability to define and enable/disable hyperlink domains on a per-user basis based on the information and world-view that he, or the organization of which he is a member, brings to the problem the user is researching. In other words, in addition to conventional hyperlinks, which reveal the focus of others, what is needed is a user-centric, organization-centric, and domain-centric hyperlinks that are automatically applied to every bit of textual data present in the system or displayed to the user.